Tim Sayell sends in an article concerning new discoveries of substantial water on Mars. There has been ample discoveries of water with the polar missions, but to this point large bodies of water were merely extrapolations. Now with this new body of evidence it is clear that Mars did in fact have huge bodies of open water. This new evidence takes the form of: "definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars" according to an article in Yahoo News.
Researchers have found an ancient shoreline of a large deep-water lake that existed some three billion years ago. It covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada.
Another truly astonishing discovery is just how fast this lake disappeared! Mars is a dry planet now....no big surprise. How fast it became that way, might be though. As bodies of water on Earth evaporate they leave successive shorelines. Mars' lake did indeed leave a shoreline but only one. It's very possible that the climate change on Mars was so dramatic and fast that the lake may have frozen solid and sublimated to water vapor over millions of years.
Yahoo story CBS News story
*I thought I would share an observation that Shaun Saunders had on the pic for this article. If we view the original graphic for this story you see a fairly typical horizon shot with the the sun light being filtered through the Martian atmosphere....which of course is rendered in red which as we have seen over the past years of photography from Mars is totally wrong. Shaun points out that the sky should as he puts it should be "pale blue, like Arizona, not red, unless there is a current dust storm in the area" Well I feel like a de de de for missing that....lol
Researchers have found an ancient shoreline of a large deep-water lake that existed some three billion years ago. It covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada.
Another truly astonishing discovery is just how fast this lake disappeared! Mars is a dry planet now....no big surprise. How fast it became that way, might be though. As bodies of water on Earth evaporate they leave successive shorelines. Mars' lake did indeed leave a shoreline but only one. It's very possible that the climate change on Mars was so dramatic and fast that the lake may have frozen solid and sublimated to water vapor over millions of years.
Yahoo story CBS News story
*I thought I would share an observation that Shaun Saunders had on the pic for this article. If we view the original graphic for this story you see a fairly typical horizon shot with the the sun light being filtered through the Martian atmosphere....which of course is rendered in red which as we have seen over the past years of photography from Mars is totally wrong. Shaun points out that the sky should as he puts it should be "pale blue, like Arizona, not red, unless there is a current dust storm in the area" Well I feel like a de de de for missing that....lol
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